Complex IT environments now have sophisticated server and application environments with multiple layers of influence on each other. This poses significant problems when scheduling software updates to the infrastructure, and vendors are often faced with questions from their customers such as: How long should I plan for this upgrade? How long with this repair take? How long would a rollback take in the event of failure?
IT managers are under intense pressure to ensure maximum systems availability, while maintaining strict audit compliance through regular software updates and updates to the data processing systems to maintain security and reliability. Unfortunately these two goals are often in conflict, as updating or upgrading typically results in significant service interruption.
Additionally, any changes made to production systems are high risk and must be carefully planned with sufficient time for problem resolution in the event that the software updates do not execute as planned. This often leads to significant over-provisioning of outage windows for the software updates, resulting in reduced systems availability.